It is not for fans to ‘reclaim’ Jewish slurs – football has no place for them
Chelsea did the right thing with a withering attack on some of their followers this week – but Spurs fans also have lessons to learn about using the term ‘Yid’
As my flight landed in Barcelona on Tuesday, there was a stirring of the Tottenham Hotspur fans on board, the burst of a song, that low repetition of “Yiddos” at the end, and for a minute I was struck by how strange it would be not to know any of the context of the day and the game ahead.
Imagine not being a football fan, unaware Spurs were playing Barcelona in a critical Champions League game that night. Imagine not knowing Spurs have a hazy, unofficial connection with the Jewish community – thought to date back to the movement of East End Jewish families to Tottenham in the 1920s for work – as your plane taxied to the terminal, wondering whether the decent thing to do was to intervene, given the discomfort any Jewish person might feel. Then think of your response when someone tried to explain the limp context English football attaches to the word.
This week, the shame was on those Chelsea fans who sang the word “Yids” in Budapest. There have been the usual denials but those reliable, decent-thinking Chelsea fans’ groups are in no doubt the chant in question was heard. The statement issued by Chelsea was the most withering in recent memory any club has made about a section of their own support.
There is no question the club have faced anti-Semitism head on, and most fans will tell you it is so much better than it was even 10 years ago, but sometimes, like the last flick of the dinosaur’s tail, it stirs.
It is more than four years now since an investigation into three Spurs fans using racially aggravated language – the word “Yids” in a chant – was dropped, their season tickets restored and their bans overturned. The Crown Prosecution Service decided they had not been maliciously motivated and since then the debate on Spurs’ fans self-identification as “Yids” or “Yiddos” has ebbed.
“Yid” is an uncomfortable word used outside the Yiddish language, whether drifting down the aisle of a plane, or in the streets around a stadium. It is a word freighted by centuries of history and with a relevance to so many. It feels too delicate in the mouth of football fans and so it has proved again this week.
The dismal response of those Chelsea fans who used “Yids” in a derogatory chant about Spurs in Budapest this week is that their despised rival fans use it themselves. The old call-and-response defence. That is where we are now, a word tossed between two groups of supporters in exchanges that cannot hope to acknowledge the sensitivities of the history that it evokes.
It would be so much better if it was laid aside, de-weaponised and given back to the Jewish community, although that feels ever more hopeless.
David Baddiel has long made the fundamental point that “Yid” is not for Spurs fans to reclaim, even if they may well, as a club, have had a higher than usual representation of Jewish fans in their supporter base. The Jewish Chronicle estimated that in the 1930s there were as many as 10,000 Jewish fans in the average Spurs home crowd, although that seems to have come from the guesswork of newspaper reporters of the day. From 1982, the club have had Jewish owners.
The Jewish community in the United Kingdom is estimated to be between 280,000 and 300,000, around 0.4 per cent of the population, and while it might be higher at Spurs games, no one would claim it is anything close to a majority. Baddiel’s point is unanswerable: there is no moral right for Spurs fans to reclaim the word for the simple reason most of them are not Jewish. But, of course, this is football and he is a Chelsea fan, so the assumption is he must have an agenda.
The use of “Yids” in the Chelsea chant on Thursday night was of a pejorative context, “Tottenham are a load of Yids”, and it is the thin end of the wedge when the most offensive historical anti-Semitic chants from that club are considered. It is those Chelsea fans who are in the wrong and they who are to blame for the most crass and offensive use of the word. But it does not belong in football on either side.
The Community Support Trust, the charity that protects the British Jewish community from anti-Semitism, does not want criminal prosecutions for those Spurs fans who use the word “Yid” as an identifier for their club, but they would rather it was not used at all. Outside of football, no one else does, unless you are talking about the Orthodox Jewish community themselves.
Grass-roots Jewish clubs have seen a recent rise in incidents of antiSemitism, which accounted for 10 per cent of racially motivated attacks reported to Kick It Out this season. One does not have to be Jewish to feel that discomfort when the word is thrown about in a football stadium.
Cue the list of inevitable responses – Ajax fans in Amsterdam have been known to riff on their team’s nickname of “the Jews” or even “the Super Jews”. Leeds United were once known as a Jewish club but no longer.
Chelsea face the “rent boy” chant, a casually homophobic taunt that does not seem to attract the condemnation it deserves. “Yids” is thought to have been established as a racist insult in the British lexicon during the brief period of Oswald Moseley’s agitating, which says it all really. Why does it have a place in 21st-century football stadiums?
Still the word is there in the mouths of Chelsea fans and Spurs fans, grossly inappropriate for modern football, with its swivel-eyed rivalries, its unhinged tribalism and its totally epic banter. “Yids”, “Yiddos”, all of it should be handed back to the people who really know what it means and what it represents. Because judging by the last week’s events, football still seems to be clueless.
It is a word freighted by history and with a relevance to so many